


(a loss of control) the sky swallows whole

by sea_level



Category: Project Blue Book (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M, POV Alternating, Pacific Theater, Stranded on a deserted island, Vampire Turning, Vampire!Michael Quinn, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2020-02-29 21:12:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18786310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sea_level/pseuds/sea_level
Summary: Lieutenant Michael Quinn's life as a pilot in the Army Air Force goes horribly off-course when he's shot down over the Pacific Ocean. Getting turned into a vampire will do that to you. It turns out not to be as much of a life sentence as he'd feared when a civilian consultant with the Navy, Dr J. Allen Hynek, shows up on the island he's been marooned on.





	1. deviating so drastically from the initial script (Michael)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Started writing March 25, 2019)
> 
> Title and chapter titles from Skies by Protest the Hero. (Stunning song if it's your speed.)
> 
> Uh, brief heads up, some of the stuff described in this first chapter is probably a little gross. I tried not to linger on it too much. Vampire stuff. Yeah. (Also tried to go a little more traditional with the whole vampire thing? But I took some liberties.)
> 
> Mega shout out to [Challenger2011](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Challenger2011/pseuds/Challenger2011) for helping me out with the airplane bits and saving me from more days of confused research. Also shout out to my dad who inadvertently helped me work out a ton of cause and effect stuff because I can't keep my mouth shut. I seriously hope he never finds this because he would recognize the plot of the first chapter, and then I'd have to fake my death.
> 
> Please tell me if you find any typos/syntax errors/etc!
> 
> Heads up, this is really slow going at first, but I intend to speed it up. Slow as in...Allen literally only shows up at the tail end of chapter 1.

Michael's out over the Pacific when the SOS comes in. He's with a small group of four other pilots, too few in number to make up a true squadron. They’re the stragglers, the ones who were left behind from various other squadrons to make sure that everything was in order at Canton. They’re on their way to Efate now to meet up with the others to get ready for an upcoming operation. They’d left a little later than they’d intended, the sun already almost swallowed up by the horizon, but they’ve still got a week before the operation’s supposed to take place, so they’re not in much of a rush.

“We have time,” Dicky says over the radio. “He’s one of ours.”

“Range?” Fish asks.

“‘Bout 150?” Milo proposes.

“I’d say 25,” Michael says. “Cloud cover.”

“125 it is,” Buzz says. “Milo and I will take north.”

“You okay solo, Can?” Dicky asks.

“Roger,” Michael replies.

“Copy,” Dicky says. “I’ll take Fish east. You good with south-west?”

“All good,” Michael confirms.

“Great,” Dicky says. “Go straight to Efate if you don’t find him.”

“Copy.” It comes in scattered but four-fold and then they split.

Michael doesn’t find anyone in the first twenty minutes. The islands are few and far between, and the sun’s even lower, but he should still be in reasonable range. Navigation sucks, as per usual, but he’s been keeping a close eye on his location.

Another ten turns up nothing but open ocean. Five more minutes find a short stretch of land, but a quick flyby shows it's unpopulated. It’s starting to feel like a good time to turn back.

 _Just one more island_ , he thinks to himself. He wouldn’t want to be negligent, to let someone remain stranded just because he wasn’t willing to go the extra mile.

He checks the fuel gauge when he comes upon another island. It looks fine. There’s at least enough gas for him to get to the base. He dips down a little lower to make sure that anyone on the ground can see or hear him. It's dark out, and the P-38's engines are pretty quiet, relatively speaking, so he hopes that, if someone's down there, they'll be able to notice of him.

The impact is strange and sudden, announcing itself with the horrible screech of tearing metal. He works quickly to correct the imbalance. Michael hadn’t seen it coming at all. He takes a breath and forces himself to be calm. This would be a horrible time to lose his head. At least whatever it was that hit him had missed the fuselage, or he might be dead.

If he had to guess, something very large and very heavy had somehow been hurled up from the island in front of him, ripping through the front of the right wing of the plane. He couldn’t know for sure, on account of it being night and almost pitch black out.

What he does know is that right wing’s leaking fuel fast and the weight imbalance is pulling the left wing down. If he doesn’t get over to the island quickly, he’s fated for a very miserable burial at sea.

Okay. _Keep calm_ , he tells himself, despite absolutely not feeling it at all. He’ll die if he can’t pull this off. At least he knows what to do. He feathers the propellers on the right wing and jettisons the drop tank on the left. The roll corrects as the weight balances out, and the landing gear drops and locks into place with a bang.

He misses colliding directly with the side of a cliff by mere feet. His landing angle is a little weird, the nose a little far down, and he bounces up off the grass once, twice, and then he’s firmly on the ground. He feathers the other propellor and pumps the brakes. The plane slows, and he finally comes to a merciful stop just before reaching the treeline.

Michael sinks down into his seat and tries to get his heartbeat to slow down. Christ, that was close. There had been no intelligence indicating hostile occupation in this area of the Pacific. Still, someone had to have shot him down. The island isn’t safe. Whoever it was that hit him is definitely going to show up to see the wreckage. He needs to get moving and fast.

He unbuckles his seatbelt, detaches his radio cable, and digs around for his .38 Colt revolver, scrambling to get it loaded. Snapping the cylinder back into place, he cocks the gun and twists in his seat to look around. It’s still pretty damn dark out and sun up isn’t for a few more hours. 

Rescue is always a possibility, but he definitely can’t expect anyone until morning at the absolute earliest. He might be a little too far off course to expect anyone to come looking for him here, but he’ll have to stay awake, just in case anyone passes by overhead.

He’s just about ready to head out when the canopy is ripped off. The metal screeches as it tears and the cold air rushes in. It’s disorienting, and it becomes even worse when a pale, gaunt face drops down from above and lands on the nose, rocking the plane.

Michael fires on reflex and hits the guy in the chest point blank, but the bullet flattens against his skin and drops uselessly. It really doesn’t make any sense. It _could_ be that he’s just hallucinating, the stink of jet fuel heavy in the air. Just to be safe, he fires three more useless rounds before the man (though in order for it to be a man, it would have to be human, and he’s not sure that it is) stands up from his crouch and roundhouse kicks him in the face.

Michael thinks, perhaps belatedly, maybe it wasn’t the jet fuel getting to his head before he blacks out, unconscious.

* * *

He wakes up feeling nauseous. His stomach rolls sluggishly, the sensation of hunger so strong he nearly gags.

He’s in some sort of cave. It’s dark, and he can barely see. Off to his left, the cavern is slightly lit. Daylight.

His hands are tied roughly behind his back, the rope having chafed his wrists raw. His jacket, helmet, gloves, and goggles are gone, leaving him in just a t-shirt and pants. He’s not physically bound in a way that would prevent him from standing up, but he’s woozy enough that he’s not convinced he could stay vertical for very long.

Michael has experienced extreme hunger before, but he’s pretty sure this isn’t it. It almost feels like he’s been drugged, though he supposes that’s not entirely out of the question.

He hears the crunch of dirt and stone underfoot, and he twists in time to see the strange man from the night before emerge from deeper within the cave. Michael inches backward towards the cave wall, pressing his back to it. It’s a pointless action, but it makes him feel a little better.

It’s the first time that Michael really gets a good look at the man. His skin is still the same grayed-out pale, all boney angles and manic look, but it’s the clothes that are really strange. He’s dressed in what looks like the tattered remains of the outfit of a Spanish privateer from some bygone era.

“You,” the man says. “You are the one that piloted that strange machine.” His voice is soft and peculiar, almost as if he is only used to speaking in questions. He directs his words to the air and hasn’t even so much as looked at Michael since he appeared. Michael would think that he was talking to himself if not for the context of the question. The man’s accent is off, too. It’s definitely Spanish, but, like his clothes, it’s out of place.

“I did,” Michael tries to say, but his throat is sensitive and dry, and it ends up coming out more like a strangled groan.

Regardless, the man nods. “Fascinating. Many of these, I have struck down. But yours is the first to survive intact.”

Michael would hardly say that’s the case, the poor plane is far from intact, but he’d prefer to contradict the guy as little as possible, at least before he understands what’s going on.

Ignoring his apparent silence, the man continues. “Normally I would prefer to finish the meal and rid myself of, ah, unwanted company? However, I find myself longing for escape again. You will take me away on your machine.”

The last sentence is relayed with such emphasis and authority that Michael nearly throws up, though he doesn’t have a clue why. He sways in place as if by some unwanted force and swallows the bile that’s risen up in his throat.

There’s no way in hell the P-38’s flying again without serious work if it hasn’t blown up already, but Michael’s mind sticks on those earlier words. Finish the meal? He understands deep down that the man means to eat him somehow, even as his mind fights to acknowledge it. How? Why? People don’t just...eat people.

Wait. Finish. The man had said finish.

There’s the implication, then, that the man has already done something to consume him. He retches. and it quickly devolves into a dry, hacking cough that makes him feel like his ribcage is falling apart.

“You are close to death,” the man muses. “This will not do.” He kneels down onto the ground and grips Michael’s jaw firmly. Michael can feel his bones screaming, begging to collapse and give way to the pressure, but then the man jerks his head sharply to the side and sinks abnormally sharp teeth into his neck.

Michael’s skin tingles and the pain starts to slip away, but with it also goes his grasp on consciousness.

The last words he hears before he blacks out again are, “My first child. Pathetic.” It honestly doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

* * *

When he finally comes to again, he feels like he’s just drunk too much caffeine. It’s not so much that his heart is beating fast (he can’t really feel it) as much as the overwhelming sensory overload. His brain feels like it’s pushing up against the confines of his skull, his thoughts running a mile a minute, though he can’t even begin to decipher them. There’s also an incredible feeling of paranoia, and he feels his body sway toward every little sound that he hears. The drip of water as it falls off the ceiling of the cave. The rustle of leaves outside. Dirt shifting under a foreign object.

In the haze, he realizes that the overwhelming pain and nausea from earlier are gone. He’s still starving, but he no longer feels quite so... _dead_.

He lurches to his feet and shakes his head, willing his vision to behave. It’s a little blurry and entirely too contrasty, brights too bright, darks too dark, and almost nothing in between. He latches onto the outline of the man.

“What the fuck,” he gasps, and oh, nice, his voice is working again. “What the fuck is going on.”

“You are like me now,” the man says directly to Michael this time, and it takes him a minute to process why it feels so strange. Something in the man’s manner has shifted. He no longer speaks around him or casts his glance to the side. Michael looks straight into his eyes and sees nothing but fathoms upon fathoms of endless disgust.

A wave of overwhelming and unexplainable anger washes over him. He swallows and tightens his fists behind his back. The rope is still there, keeping his hands tied together, and he fights against it. It falls away with little protest. He recognizes somewhere in the back of his mind that this is strange and new and definitely not normal, but the last remnants of rational thought are washed away by the mounting tide of his instinct. He feels the loss of control and the terror that’s generated from it, but something’s pushing it down, suppressing it.

Fear flashes briefly on the man’s face, but it quickly shifts to excitement. The temperature of the entire cave seems to rise. “Yes, yes, I understand what is going on! Your anger for me is born of my disappointment in you!”

He circles Michael, looking at him scrutinizingly. Michael feels frozen in place. He pushes against the invisible bonds with the full force of his rage, but it is to no avail.

“I think about like would be like away from this horrible little island, and I think maybe it is not so good,” the man says. “I think this is poetic. In your strongest moment, you destroy me. In my weakest moment, I die. I was ready for change, but I did not see all the paths before me as I see them now. This! This is the avenue I will take.”

Michael’s anger ebbs slightly, giving way to an eddy of confusion, and he wavers on the spot, trying to gather himself. The man _wants_ him to kill him? This is all making no goddamn sense.

“No,” the man snaps. “You will not this anger fade now. I have decided. I do not desire to rejoin the outside world, but I have no desire to remain here either.”

Michael squeezes his eyes shut. He’s not in control of himself at all. He almost feels like he’s a passenger in his own body, except maybe it’s that he’s not even in there at all.

“I have been here for a century,” the man roars. “I developed this awful condition and was marooned here by my friends. I was unable to leave, so I was forced to remain. Now you will absolve me. It is the only useful thing you will ever do for me.”

The anger abates entirely, but it is replaced with something else. Determination? Sorrow? It’s a strange, foreign emotion, and it’s definitely not his own. His body moves on its own volition. His head jerks forward, and he feels his teeth sink into the web of the man’s neck. Something pulses and drains in the space behind his nose. His tongue touches the man’s ashen skin and he chokes, jerking backward.

“Now you are the last free man on earth,” the man gasps and collapses onto the ground. “No bond. No debt.”

Michael gasps as the emotion floods out of him in an instant. A deep yanking sensation pulls at his throat, strong and tight, and it feels almost as if someone is drawing a long string up through his esophagus. The man convulses and then disintegrates on the floor, turning to dust and leaving only the tatters of his clothes behind. Michael retches dryly. If there was something in his stomach, he’s certain he would have thrown it up.

Sensation returns to his fingers, and he finally, finally feels like he can think with clarity.

It’s not worth much because nothing makes _any_ fucking sense.

He stumbles back toward the wall of the cave and closes his eyes. Everything is startlingly calm. His senses have balanced out again and his brain no longer feels quite so turbulent.

The awful condition the man had mentioned. It couldn’t be, could it? It would make sense, but it can’t be true because vampires aren’t real.

If he’s correct, and the man was a vampire, that also led to the startling implication that he’s was a vampire now too. It might explain...

In the face of too many unknowns, Michael finds it easy to ascribe each and every irregularity to a magical catch-all explanation.

He stumbles further into the cave, his disability more of an effect of his shock than any physical injury. He doesn’t know what he expects to find, but he didn’t expect to have to go so deep to get it.

The corridor winds but blessedly doesn’t split, and his vision adjusts as the dark of the cave begins to swallow him up entirely. His vision isn’t perfect in the dark, but it’s worlds away from the night vision devices he’d been given before.

Nearing the point where the cave chokes off, Michael finds a lovingly maintained chest. It’s closed, but it lacks any sort of lock, so he opens it.

Its contents are sparse, containing several papers and diagrams with fading ink, some lost almost entirely to the passage of time. There are several trinkets: an unadorned chalice, a simple brooch, and a locket engraved with a coat of arms. He pries the locket open, but all that’s left inside are scattered flakes of paint, very few still adhered to the inside surface. He supposes the coat of arms might be significant, but it won’t do him any good here on the island.

The diagrams consist of weaponry and experimental aircraft that look interesting but he knows could never fly. There is one of a ship, but the ink’s almost completely gone, and it’s been torn right down the middle. A rough sketch of a catapult pops out at him. The edges of the page are heavily worn, but the ink is still dark.

The diagram itself is useless to him, but it might explain how he got shot down. A catapult is a bit of an odd thing to use as an anti-aircraft weapon, and it would have to have been really damn strong to reach him. On the other hand, it’s just been that kind of day where he’s about ready to believe just about anything.

He catches a name in the middle of a letter. Pero de Balbuena. The letter’s purpose is to ensure safe passage through foreign land, or at least Michael guesses it is from what little he can read. He doesn’t know if that’s actually the name of the man, but it’s not that important, so Pero it is.

It’s dated back to the mid-1850s, right at the end of the Age of Sail. Michael whistles. Pero had been stuck on this rock for nearly a century.

There’s nothing else but a few bones and a shocking number of phalanges. It’s very strange, and Michael decides he’d rather ignore it and hope that it’s not a premonition that he’s going to become some strange finger-bone hoarding cave vampire.

He puts everything back in its place and returns back to where Pero’s dust is scattered on the ground. Michael scuffs through the mess with his boot to see if there’s anything else he can find. The clothing is still intact, or rather as intact as it was before Pero’s death. He has one of Michael’s flattened bullets in his pocket, a plain, golden ring, and a small matchbook he must have taken from the plane. Michael recognizes it as his own. He takes it back and the ring along with it for good measure.

He’s struck suddenly by the realization that he doesn’t know what comes next. It’s silent now, for the first time since he landed here (really, for the first time in years, if he includes the chaos of the war). Now that he knows he’s alone in the cave and safe from any immediate threats, it means he has options. He can start to form his own plans and think things through instead of reacting on instinct. It’s a little daunting, but he’s been trained for this. 

The Army Air Force should send someone out to look for him. Maybe they’ve already come and gone, but, if someone did pass overhead, they should have seen the poor, wrecked P-38 and known that someone was here. He’s still probably got a chance. The other option is that he hasn’t been unconscious for long enough, and they’re still out there looking for him. He’s just out of range of the expected area, but there’s still a pretty sizeable chance he’d be found.

He should probably head up outside of the cave and figure out where he is on the island, maybe see if there’s anything he can do to make himself more visible. A nice big “HELP” made of branches or rocks couldn’t hurt.

He’s walking towards the mouth of the cave when a wave of nausea overtakes him and his nerve endings begin to prickle.

Sunlight. Shit.

Michael gasps in pain and retreats back into the cave. The burning sensation abates almost immediately.

Wait. Fucking shit. Sunlight.

Fuck. He’s a vampire. He’s _actually_ a goddamn vampire.

Who knows what the Army will do to him when they find him. Probably kill him, he reasons, because if the movies are true then he’s definitely some kind of threat.

Not that he feels like a threat. He hasn’t had any particular evil thoughts, and mostly he just wants to sleep or maybe go flying again. A nice book wouldn’t go amiss.

Except. Except he can’t fly anymore. Not in daylight and certainly not under the watchful eye of the Army Air Force. Shit, and they’re out there looking for him too.

Michael’s head spins, but he’s always been good under pressure, so he forces himself to take a long, deep, unnecessary breath to calm his...uh...nonexistent heartbeat. Well. It’s the thought that counts.

First step, remove any visible indications that he’s here. He’ll have to—fuck. Fuck. He’ll have to get rid of the P-38. She’s as good as fucked what with the wing and the canopy being torn through, but it still hurts. It would be easier on his heart to find a way to hide her in the shrubbery, but it wouldn’t be safe, and it would serve little functional purpose. He’ll have to push her over the cliff and give her a nice ocean sendoff. Fitting and fucked up at the same time.

He’ll have to level the grass in that area so that it doesn’t look like a plane landed there. He’ll probably have to toss his tags too, but he might be able to get away with keeping them on him.

No, it’s probably a better idea not to risk it.

This is all dependent on the fact that no one manages to find him before nightfall. He’s probably not even an hour away from Efate, and he still doesn’t know how many days he’s lost. He’s hoping that he was only out for a few hours each of the times he’d blacked out.

Nightfall takes its sweet time arriving. Michael’s not keen on risking civil twilight, and, just to be safe, he waits past nautical and astronomical twilight too until it’s well and truly dark outside.

It’s something of a relief to be able to walk outside and escape the cave, even if it’s into the great unknown. As he suspected, he can see in the dark just fine, almost as good as if it were daylight. The sounds around him are amplified, but, like the ticking of a clock, it fades away when he ignores it.

The forest is heavily wooded and a little difficult to navigate, but it’s a little easier to jump up on things and climb, so he can travel pretty fast. It’s probably another effect of being a vampire.

He spends a good few hours trying to figure out where he is on the island and what the island itself looks like. It’s small and probably pretty round, though he hasn’t quite yet reached the shore. He’s betting it’s not an atoll, based on what he saw while he was still up in the air, so it should make the island a little easier to traverse.

He stumbles across the catapult in a small, elevated clearing. It's an astoundingly large counterweight trebuchet, too big and too complex for one person to fire it alone, but Michael supposes that a sufficiently knowledgeable and desperate vampire could find a way.

The tree cover in the area has been forcefully sheared away, and the ground is littered with transplanted boulders. The boulders themselves are pretty damn big, but, when Michael tries to lift one, it goes up without too much resistance. It’s more than a little surreal.

He finds the plane eventually. By his estimate, he’s still got half the night, and he should be able to find his way back to the cave without too much trouble. 

The P-38 reeks of jet fuel, and he can see it’s still dripping out of the tank. That probably means that he hadn’t been unconscious to _too_ long, which is good news. He carefully climbs up and digs around the cockpit looking for anything he might be able to salvage.

He finds his Colt, which could be useful, so he snags it and what few rounds he has left along with the knife. The flare will have to go, but the flashlight is probably fine, not that he particularly needs it. His watch is on the floor of the cockpit, but it’s broken, so he leaves it there. He takes the first aid kit, but he’ll have to dispose of the packaging. There’s a survival ration, but he takes a sniff of it, and he somehow knows he won’t be able to eat it. Michael grimaces. Food’s definitely going to be a problem, then. He takes the soap bar out of it and discards the rest of the pack.

He finds his discarded clothes on the ground, but they’re all identifiable as military so they’ll have to go. He grabs them and heads towards the back of the tailboom towards the baggage compartments. He has a clean, nondescript change of clothes in one, which he exchanges for the clothes he picked up. In the other compartment, he finds a bag of tools. A quick review of the tools tells him that they probably won’t do much good, but the bag’s unlabeled, so he dumps the tools straight into the compartment and puts all the stuff he’s grabbed in the bag.

He does a quick check to make sure that everything buoyant is secure and that everything that can close is closed. All that’s left is getting the plane over the cliff and down into the ocean. He takes a few seconds of silence in to thank it and then gets to work.

He doesn’t want to risk turning the engine over in case the whole thing catches fire, but he figures he probably has enough strength in him to snap the parking brakes off.

When he stomps down on them, they break without putting up too much of a fight. Michael guesses that shouldn’t be too surprising. The metal bends pliantly under his boot before breaking off entirely. When he removes the last brake, the plane starts to roll slowly in the wrong direction, but it stops when he grabs onto it, digging his heels into the dirt.

It’s more work that he’s had to put into anything else thus far, but it’s understandable provided that it’s over six tons of airplane.

It takes a lot of doing and honestly more time than he’d prefer, but he manages to get the plane right to the precipice. He shifts his position and pushes the plane the rest of the way. It teeters on the edge and then tumbles down, spinning as it goes. The sound it makes when it hits the water is jarring and painful but it comes with an odd sense of relief.

His internal clock says he doesn’t have too much time left to linger, but he still hasn’t dealt with the tracks. They’re pretty visible in the dirt, and the best he can probably do is to upset the soil, hope it blends in, and doesn’t look too unnatural.

He finds the canopy discarded under the treeline and figures it’s just about as good as a giant shovel. He tills the dirt in the area as quickly as he can and then chucks the canopy off the side of the cliff.

It’s a mad dash back to the cave after that, but he manages to make it back before sun up.

* * *

Things fall into a pattern after that.

Michael finds it easier to sleep during the day, even if it’s hell on his circadian rhythm. Still, the date’s a little far off from the equinox, so the days are much longer than the nights. There’s a good amount of time that occurs between when he wakes up some eight odd hours after daybreak and when the sun finally goes down far enough that he can explore properly. 

He feels no particular urge to become like Pero so he decides to try to journal to keep his mind healthy and focused. The one caveat is that he doesn’t exactly have paper but he figures he can just write into the dirt on the cave floor. When he’s done with it, he can just scuff it over, and that’ll be that.

When it comes down to it though, he has a hard time finding what to write. There’s no adequate way to summarize everything that’s happened in the past few days. It takes too long to write the letters out on the ground with a stick. Maybe journaling wasn’t such a good idea.

He writes, “SNAFU” but then quickly replaces it with “SASFU”. Situation abnormal, still fucked up. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue in the same way. He erases it too.

A raging hunger crawls over him sometimes, but it’s not like he has a lot of options in that regard, so he swallows the pain down waits for it to abate.

He caves once and tracks down some non-questionable looking fruit. It turns out he can’t digest it though, and it sits like a rock in his stomach until it passes.

He’d try the blood of the local wildlife, but no matter how hard he looks he can’t seem to find any animals. He does find a lot of bones, scattered here and there, and it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that Pero had probably done away with the local fauna quite some time ago.

It did leave Michael with a hell of a lot of bugs though. There’s a bit of bug spray in the first aid kit, but the bugs are more annoying than actually harmful, so he swears off it until a time when he might need it more.

The days and nights pass like molasses. As his hunger mounts, he starts to disassemble trebuchet and scatters the parts around the island. It's less about hiding potentially suspicious evidence and more about making sure that he doesn't do anything bad if he loses himself to the starvation.

He doesn't know if he'll do anything reckless or morally depraved like shooting down pilots, but he'd prefer to give that version of himself as few options as possible.

No one does end up coming for him. There's no telltale roar of plane engines overhead, and the waters are almost painfully quiet. They would have shown up by now if they were going to at all. They were only a short week out from a major operation, and once that begins he's as good as abandoned.

He knows that having no one out there looking for him is the safest outcome, but it does hurt a bit deep down. He forces the thought aside, but he has enough time alone with nothing but his own mind that it surfaces again from time to time.

He's about five days in when he wakes up nearly paralyzed with hunger. When he tries to move an arm or a leg, the pain echoes straight into the pit of his stomach. He can feel the acid burning away at the lining of his stomach, which is really doesn't make any sense because he's supposed to be a vampire, but no amount of logic will make it stop happening. 

A small fly lands on his arm and starts to crawl around. The tickling sensation its movement generates barely registers on top of everything else he’s feeling, but his senses zero in on it and lock into place.

There’s something going on behind the scenes of his mind that he can’t quite grasp. Something is moving in there, sliding into place. When the fly takes off into the air, he feels his rational brain slide away and the whole world shifts.

He tries to hang on, but he’s swept away by the tides of his instinct. It’s a warm, correct feeling though, not like what had happened with Pero, so he gives over to it and just lets himself be.

* * *

When he comes to, his stomach feels full, but his limbs feel weird and out of place. His vision’s also fucked along with his center of gravity.

He flops around on the ground, which is definitely weird because he’s starting to get the feeling that he’s somehow much smaller than he was before.

Instinct nudges at him, and he screams which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense until he begins to realize that he can tell where all the surfaces surrounding him are even if it can’t see them, and it all falls into place. 

Oh shit. He’s turned into a bat.

In what’s simultaneously a moment of relief and distress, he flounders around and then shifts back into human form, at least appeasing the worry that he might be stuck as a bat forever.

Michael is left hyperventilating, cold, and naked, clutching his knees to his chest in the interior of the cave.

A million thoughts occur to him at once, flowing easier now that is brain has expanded back to its normal size. He can fly. Vampires _can_ , in fact, turn into bats. How exactly does he go about turning into a bat? The no clothes thing is rather unfortunate. _He can fly!_ He probably just ate a shit ton of bugs, which is gross, but it's one hell of a solution. Can he eat bugs as a human? Probably not. _He can fucking fly_.

He doesn't remember much from when he was a bat, though that might have been on account of being on a food-starved, instinct-driven, bug-eating rampage. If the bat version of him would ordinarily have the presence of mind like he had when he’d just woken up, then maybe being a bat wouldn’t be half-bad.

He looks around the cavern and finds his clothes lying on the ground in the place that he'd been laying. Shakily, he gets to his feet and stumbles over to them. Wiping off the dirt, he dresses again and then checks the mouth of the cave for sunlight. It’s still night but barely. The sun should be above the horizon in an hour’s time. 

Michael groans. He feels wide awake, and he’s absolutely not ready to go back to sleep again.

The thought of flying pulls at him. Since disposing of any necessary identifying evidence and memorizing the layout of the island, he’s run out of short term goals. Being able to turn into a bat gives him something to focus on. Something to familiarize himself with. He could also probably fly forever without ever tiring of it..

Hesitantly, he undresses and folds up his clothes neatly, setting them on the cleanest patch of dirt he can find. He steadies himself against the wall and closes his eyes, trying to think of how he might make the shift.

All it takes is the intent. It kind of feels like the air is scooped out from under him, but suddenly he’s up in the air, pumping his _wings_ (actual goddamn wings!) to stay aloft and hover in place.

It feels as natural as walking, though maybe walking after spending a week bedridden. He echolocates to get a sense of where he is and then flits about, quickly getting the hang of how the steering is supposed to work.

It’s a lot like flying a plane, he supposes. Some of the motions are similar in a glide, but it happens more naturally. It’s flexible and first-hand, but the rush is all the same. Fast means less maneuverability, slow means more. Way more than he’s ever had before.

He feels uninhibited and oddly complete. He's so caught up in the euphoria that he doesn't realize when he swings a little too close to the cave entrance until he feels the sunlight pressing into his back and wings.

He darts inward in fear, but neither nausea nor the burning feeling come.

He chances it again, landing on the wall and crawling over stone until the light begins to warm him.

It feels _good_.

He stays there for a while, basking, before leaving the cave for the forest. He's missed the sun, maybe not as a bat but definitely as a human, and it's nice to immerse himself in it.

The island is large now, but he travels much faster. Landmarks pass like echoed blurs as he dips and swerves through the tree branches

The inland spring he's been drinking from is significantly more refreshing, and it no longer tastes quite so questionable.

He catches a few bugs here and there, swooping in to pluck them off rocks and trees. It feels a little strange to be eating insects at first, but he quickly gets used to it. It's easier the less he thinks about it.

He wears out at about midday. He spirals around the shore for a little bit. It's only a short stretch of sand, and the waters deepen quickly, so it makes for a rather poor beach, but it's the only place a small ship could easily land. Aside from that, there's no way anyone else could end up on the island if they also intended to leave at the end of the day.

He skims low over the ocean water, and the salts from the sea spray collect on the fur on his chest. 

Michael makes it back to the cave a few hours before dusk, and he sleeps solidly for the rest of the day.

* * *

He spends a good handful of nights flying for the lack of anything better to do. The flying itself never quite loses its novelty, and it provides him with an opportunity to eat, but the island starts to feel painfully small. He’s trapped there, surrounded by water on all sides, and he starts to feel a bit stir crazy.

He’s been stuck on small islands for extended periods of time before during his short stint in the Pacific theater. It’s worse now that he nothing to do and no one to talk to though.

He can’t help but think of Pero’s diagrams and wonder if there was something in there that would get him off the island, but he’d dismissed them in the beginning for a reason. It wouldn’t do to allow himself to indulge himself in that fantasy.

As long as he’s here to stay, he figures he might as well make the cave as homey as possible. Nearly two weeks worth of nights sleeping on the floor has started to take its toll, even if the residual soreness fades away quickly after he wakes. He’s not exactly an expert on building furniture, but he’s got a hell of a lot of time to learn, doesn’t he?

He’s on his third attempt at a rudimentary bed frame constructed from fallen branches when he hears the telltale sound of a ship’s motor far off on the ocean. It’s quite a distance away, the sound amplified by his enhanced hearing, but it draws closer and closer until the sound cuts off completely.

Michael stops breathing (which is fine since it’s not compulsory, but he always starts again when he stops thinking about it). Someone’s landed on the island.

It’s early morning, just at the beginning of nautical dawn. It’s too much of a risk for him to just walk outside and see who it is since it’s about the time of day when the nausea would start even if he won’t burn up just yet.

Though straight up introducing himself would be an abysmally poor idea. He doesn’t know who’s out there, much less what they’d do with him. They’ll find him for sure, though, if they stay on the island for any extended period of time.

He shucks off his clothes and shifts into bat form. At least this way, he can scope out the ship without being seen.

At top speed, it still takes a bit of time to make it to the shore, but no one’s outside yet. He crawls up alongside the cliff face that borders the side of the beach that the ship’s parked on and echolocates to get a better look at it. It’s a painfully familiar shape, a PT boat if he’s ever seen one, sans the torpedoes. It’s Navy, so the crew probably won’t recognize him as a member of the Army Air Force, but they might kill him if he looks sufficiently suspicious. For what it’s worth, he actually _is_ suspicious, being a vampire and all.

A few hours pass before anyone actually leaves the boat, everyone likely having gone inside to prepare after they parked.

A military man pops out, gun first, then the rest of him, followed by another, and then a shorter guy, soft, and definitely not military. Too much of a slouch, hair not regulation. The guy strays off to the side, staring at the island and jotting stuff down in a small notebook, but he's pulled roughly back toward the small group of five. Definitely a scientist.

Some of the details might be off. The picture’s a little blurry since Michael's been getting all his info through echolocation, but the enhanced vampire senses apply to his bat form as well. Being closer would probably help.

The group scopes out the immediate area and then breaks apart, presumably to cover more ground. The scientist is trailed by one the Navy guys for a while and then, when they deem the island to be safe enough, is left alone.

Michael follows him for a while. The guy stares at the local geography and writes a lot in his notebook, but Michael can't really tell what it says. Flat surfaces all look irritatingly similar, even if he can tell some materials apart.

The guy's pretty docile looking, based on Michael's best guess. If anyone could help him off the island, it'd definitely be him. He'll have to tell him he's a vampire, though. He couldn't survive on the boat without a friend if they even let him in in the first place, and he needs off this island. The two weeks that he’s been here have been nice, but he is good and done. He just needs to get this guy on his side and maybe, just maybe, he'll be home free.

If the guy is like most of the scientists Michael's met, then curiosity and an open mind should open the door. All he has to do is hope the guy's not one of those asshole types who's only in it for the recognition.

He detaches from the tree trunk that he's been clinging too and dives down to make first contact.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did a ton of research for this fic in a lot of different places, and it's kind of messed around with what I consider common knowledge, so if something's not making sense, ask me about it! Also tried to adjust personalities based on the fact that I basically de-aged them like 10 years. If things seem off with characterization.


	2. dive into an endless sea (no reason to falter no plan supersedes) (Allen)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Allen arrives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as per usual, lmk if something's amiss.
> 
> i have finals coming up in two weeks so probably nothing substantial from me for a while and then i'm working. i'm not entirely sure what my work situation's gonna be like quite yet, but if i end up with a two hour commute again, you can probably expect the next chapter in the next month... (thanks metrolink!)
> 
> should be smoother sailing from here on out though...

The area that Allen’s found looks promising. It’s up on a well-elevated hill. The tree-cover is a little too heavy for his liking. It’ll hide the radar station well, but it would definitely interfere with incoming and outgoing signals. At least the trees aren’t a permanent feature, if all else fails.

He’s marking his location down on the map sketch when something bumps into him from behind. He jumps and turns around, but nothing’s there. He looks around wildly until he catches sight of something moving in front of him. A small creature hovers in the air briefly and then flies off deeper into the woods. It’s a bat, if Allen had to make an educated guess, but definitely not one that belongs in this part of the world. It’s definitely not a bird, based on its flying behavior, but it’s too small and the profile doesn’t match for it to be a typical fruit bat. It's strange, though, that it's out at this time of day.

It’s the first animal that Allen’s seen, regardless, and that alone is enough to get his attention. Maybe there are others like it. Allen forces himself to focus on the matter at hand. He’s not here to wonder about the local wildlife.

Seconds later, the bat comes bursting out of the foliage, ramming straight into Allen’s arm. It’s so small and light that it certainly doesn’t hurt at all. He gets a better look at it when it bounces off of him. It’s definitely a New World bat, and there might be something wrong with it for it to be acting this way. It’s a little concerning.

The bat circles away then hovers in front of him, chirping. Allen stares at it, but it just stays there. Cautiously, Allen steps away, and the bat flies forward, bumping into him again and then flying away a few meters out in the same direction it had been before hovering again.

“I’m going to go now,” he says, even though he knows the bat can’t understand him.

The bat, strangely, squeaks in what can only be described as an angry manner.

“I guess I’m not going to go now?” he tries, which, against all logic, actually seems to appease it.

The bat circles and then flies off a little bit in the same direction as before and then turns around and hovers in place.

Allen figures he might as well see what happens if he follows it. It’s certainly the most exciting thing that’s happened to him since he started this assignment, a nice change from scoping out deserted island after deserted island (and hours long boat rides in between).

He takes a step or two in the direction of the bat and it loop-de-loops and flies further into the forest before stopping to wait again. Allen adopts a normal pace, and the bat keeps flying forward, stopping on occasion to wait for Allen to catch up. This is definitely very, very weird, which means he absolutely can't stop now. He needs to see how this ends.

The bat leads him to the mouth of a cave and then darts inside. Allen takes a quick look around. He doesn't really know where he is, but he should be able to backtrack just fine. The forest cover is heavier here, so significant landmarks like this don't show up on the aerial photos.

The bat pops out of the cave when he doesn't follow and squeaks at him.

“Alright,” Allen says. “I'm coming.”

Sufficiently assuaged, the bat flies back in. It leads Allen far enough into the cave that the sunlight disappears almost completely from view. Allen starts to feel like he might have made a mistake. Still, a seemingly sentient, out-of-place bat on an otherwise fauna-less island in the middle of the Pacific? It's an oddity he can't dismiss.

The bat squeaks and circles apprehensively. Then, reality seems to bend around it, and, suddenly, a very attractive and _very_ naked young man appears in its place.

“Please stay calm. Please. I don't mean any harm,” the man says, trying both to cover himself and reach for the clothes piled up in the corner that Allen hadn't even seen. “I'm sorry about having to drag you in here, but I can only go out into the sun as a bat.”

“Um,” Allen says eloquently. “I'm sorry, what?”

“Please don't scream,” the man continues, pulling on his underwear and giving no indication that he's heard what Allen had said. “Or yell. Or hit me. Or run away. I’m a vampire.”

That...wasn't what Allen was expecting. It’s a plausible explanation for the sentient bat-turned-man, even if it has absolutely no basis anywhere in scientific history. That would, of course, mean that he's alone in a cave with a very, very dangerous creature. He should probably be trying to find a way out, but his curiosity is piqued.

"Like Dracula?" Allen asks.

The man pauses and then shrugs. “I suppose so,” he says, stepping into the legs of his pants. “It only happened, like, two weeks ago, and I’m not entirely movie-accurate.”

“Like with the clothes,” Allen says. “Unless that’s a preference?”

The man flushes a beautiful red that travels from his cheeks down to his chest. “No, ah, no. This just happens. They don’t stay on when I turn into a bat.” He looks away and pulls his t-shirt on. “I just— I know it's a lot to ask since I am what I am, but I really need to get off this island, and you're the only one who can help."

There's a lot implied there that Allen would love to know more about. For that matter, there's so much about this situation that he doesn't understand. He's got a million questions and a pressing need to not feel so lost. "You couldn't just fly off the island?" he asks.

"The nearest island is too far away for my range," the man replies. "It's also uninhabited. Even if I could make it, it wouldn't do much good."

Allen thinks back to the recon photos of the neighboring island, and yeah the guy's right, but how did he know that?

“I have a lot of questions,” Allen says.

The man relaxes visibly. “I’ll tell you anything.”

The more Allen looks at him, the more the man looks like a scared kid, probably only in his early twenties at oldest. It’s offset by the beginning of a beard and the haggard look he has about him. He’s probably just as scared as Allen is. Unless, of course, vampires don’t age, and he’s lying about everything, but that amount of utter relief that appears of his face looks pretty hard to fake. If he’s telling the truth, Allen would feel pretty horrible about leaving him here on the island.

“Let’s start with your name,” Allen says. “I’m Allen. Hynek.”

“ _Doctor_?” the man guesses and lights up when Allen offers him a smile and a nod. “I’m...” He pauses and then pushes forward. “I’m Lieutenant Michael Quinn, Army Air Force.”

“Army?” Allen asks and Michael confirms. It explains a little. “What happened?”

 

Michael pauses and then crosses his arms, the space between his eyebrows creasing. “This is going to require a little bit of a suspension of disbelief. I was out alone tracking down an SOS when my plane was shot down by a boulder catapulted up from the island. I pulled off the landing, but the vampire who lived here kicked me in the head and knocked me out and brought me back here.”

“There’s another vampire here?” Allen asks warily. Why didn’t he realize it sooner? Something had to have turned Michael unless it just happened without any external factors, but that seems unlikely.

“Oh,” Michael says, “no, don’t worry. He’s dead. I was going to get to that.”

“Go on.”

“Right, so I wake up here, and the vampire, I’ve been calling him Pero, says he was going to kill me, but he wanted me to fly him off the island using my plane. There was no chance of that, but I wasn’t going to tell him. Apparently, I was right at the brink of death, so he turned me into a vampire to save me. I blacked out, but when I woke up again, it was really weird.”

“Weird how?”

“My senses were very strong and disorienting, and then Pero said something, and I got really angry, but I didn’t know why. He changed his mind about escaping and decided that he’d rather die, and then—” Michael takes a deep, shuddering breath and closes his eyes. “I don’t know. It felt like I wasn’t in control of my own body. I bit him, and he turned into dust. I killed him, but I think he might have forced me to.”

It’s one hell of a tale and taller than most, but Allen, despite his reservations and better judgement, believes him. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Michael’s eyes open, and he cautiously lifts his head to look at Allen. “You believe me?” he asks.

“It’s all a little strange and new, but that’s the be expected, right?” Allen says. “What happened to your plane?”

“I dumped it into the ocean,” Michael answers. “I didn’t want anyone that knows I’m Army Air Force to find me or for someone to figure out that I am.”

“But you told me,” Allen says.

“My story wouldn’t have made sense without it,” Michael says, and he’s right. It also implies that he’s put a great deal of trust in Allen, which certainly helps his case in Allen’s eyes. “But if the Navy men you’re with find out, they’ll either kill me or return to the Air Force, and then _they’ll_ kill me. Or lock me up and experiment on me.”

“Bad news either way?” Allen asks.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Michael says. “But I had to trust you. I still have to.”

There’s no way Allen’s leaving him on this island after that. The poor guy’s had enough bad things happen to him. “There’s a skin condition,” Allen says, thinking. “People who have it are hypersensitive to the sun, so they can’t go outside during the day. It’s called, ah, hold on.” He read about it in spring, but he started on K in summer, so it has to start with an earlier letter...J? G? Wait, no. H. “Hydroa vacciniforme. That should be enough to dismiss all sun-related concerns that the sailors have.”

Michael stares at him. “That’s genius.”

Allen smiles a little proudly. “HV’s also rare enough that we can use it as an explanation for other symptoms of your vampirism, and no one should catch on as long as we keep it reasonable. Not that you should be interacting much with the crew in the first place.”

“In a PT boat?” Michael asks. “It’s tiny.”

“It’s a small crew, and I think I complained a little too much about the bunking situation the last time I was brought along, so they gave me one of the officer’s quarters,” he says. “For the first time ever, the lack of windows is a bonus. How do you feel about the surname Jones?”

Michael seemed to be following along well enough until that last point. “What?”

“Sorry,” Allen says. “My thoughts got ahead of me. It’d probably be safer to give you a different last name, and I was thinking Jones since it’s common. There’s probably hundreds of Michael Jones’ out there, and you could be any one of them. Just in case anyone gets inquisitive.”

“That makes sense,” Michael says, nodding.

“How about how you got on the island?” Allen asks. “We can’t use anything close to the truth.”

“Boat’s the only other way, right?” Michael says. “Maybe...maybe I could be a fisher that went overboard? That could explain what I’m doing all the way out here.”

“Do you know much about fishing?”

“Not...not really, no,” Michael replies.

“What _do_ you know about? Or at least have an interest in? Something you didn’t learn in the Army.”

“Psychology?” Michael tries, “I guess. I don’t know that much, but I want to.”

“You could be a student, a freshman at some university,” Allen says. He pauses to think and lets the story come to him. “That way, you don’t actually have to know much. Since it’s summer, you’d be on break. Maybe you were in Hawai’i visiting relatives at your parent’s behest, paid a fishing boat to take you with them out into the ocean so you could learn more about the psyche after nothing but open sea, but then an unexpected storm blew you off course.”

“Horribly off course,” Michael interrupts to note.

Allen raises an eyebrow at Michael, but he just shrugs. “And you went overboard at some point, thankfully you weren’t too far from land, so you washed up here.”

“That could work. I’d believe it. I— Thank you.” Michael stares at him with eyes wide and full of hope. “You have no idea how much you’re helping me.”

“I can imagine,” Allen says. “I’d hate to present this as some sort of exchange, but if you allow it, I’d love to learn more about your condition.”

“Anything you want to know,” Michael offers. “Not that I know much myself, but maybe we can figure it out together.”

“How have you been eating?” Allen asks. “Can you eat normal food?”

“I’ve been eating bugs, mostly,” Michael says. “If I eat them as a bat, everything’s still fine when I turn back to a human. I can’t digest anything else I’ve tried.” He freezes. “Oh. There’s no bugs on the boat.”

"Unfortunately not.”

Michael leans back a bit until he slumps against the wall. He makes a noise of frustration. “I can’t, in good faith, ask you to bring me on that boat."

"You can drink blood, right?" Allen asks. It’s a central theme for vampires, he's pretty sure, so it wouldn't make sense for the movie to get that one thing wrong.

"I think so," Michael says. "I've never done it, but Pero could."

"Then I don't see what the problem is," Allen says. "I have blood."

Michael stares at him. "I can't. I can't ask that of you."

"You don't have to. I'm offering."

Michael looks like he's going to fight it, but then he sighs and says, "Thank you."

"It'll be my pleasure," Allen assures him.

* * *

They talk for a little while longer about Michael’s vampirism, and it’s true that he really doesn’t know much. He knows a good handful of things that he can do, but he doesn’t really know the bounds of his newfound strengths and weaknesses or if any kinds of variations exist therein.

“I’m pretty sure it’s just the one species of bat,” Michael says. “When I switch, everything always feels the same.”

“How do you switch?” Allen asks.

Michael shrugs. “It’s just this little...” He lifts his hand so that that it’s palm down and parallel to the ground, then he twists it sharply to the side to about a thirty-degree angle. “But it’s subconscious. Or maybe that’s conscious, since...? I don’t really have to think about it, just somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I just acknowledge it? And it happens.”

“So you can’t really try to turn into, say, a fruit bat?” Allen asks.

“If I think about it too hard, it doesn’t work,” Michael says. “It’s hard to explain, but I can’t really think about it. I just have to do it. Everything about being a vampire has been like that.”

They talk a bit about Pero, about how he’d ended up on the island during the Age of Sail and what he’d done while on the island, but Michael looks uncomfortable the entire time, so Allen switches topics quickly to his own work.

He tells Michael that he’s helping the Navy to set up radar stations in the Pacific. He tries to go into detail, nothing too complex, but Michael gets this startled look behind his eyes and Allen decides to spare him.

“It’s a short, one-month job that we’re well into the third week of,” Allen says. “I’m basically just tagging along so I can identify good places that we can put radar stations and make any necessary notes about the terrain and location.”

“What kind of place are you looking for?” Michael asks.

“Flat and elevated,” Allen says. “Hidden enough that it can’t be easily spotted from the air but without so much cover that the trees interfere.”

“I think I know a place like that,” Michael says. “Do you have recon photos?”

“Not on me,” Allen says, “but I’ve seen them. I’ve got a map.”

“That’s alright,” Michael says. “Did you notice anything strange about the tree cover in the north-east part of the island?”

“Not in particular,” Allen says.

“That’s where Pero’s catapult used to be before I disassembled it,” Michael continues. “The land there sounds like what you described. He cleared away some of the tree cover there, so it might be open enough. He did some real damage, so it shouldn’t grow back too fast.”

“Where is this exactly?” Allen asks. He opens up his journal to the page where the map is.

Michael stares at it a bit. “I’m not entirely sure. I can get there on foot or...wing? Is that what the island looks like? I’ve never properly seen it from above.”

“You could show me where it is,” Allen says. “We can wait until nightfall,” he adds when he sees Michael’s hand drift down toward the hem of his shirt, “so you don’t have to turn back into a bat. The Lieutenant won’t be happy with me for showing up so late, but he’ll understand once he sees you.”

They do have a while to wait, but about an hour in Michael remembers that he has a flashlight.

"How do you forget that?" Allen asks, but Michael's already standing up from where they'd been sitting on the floor.

"Haven’t needed it,” Michael says, running off deeper into the cave. Allen loses sight of him pretty quickly. He’s been in here for a while. His eyes have adjusted all they’re ever going to, and he still can barely see anything.

It’s a good five minutes before Michael shows up again, just long enough for the gravity of the situation to fully sink in. He’s going to be bringing a vampire onto a military vessel. He’s going to have a vampire in his quarters for the next week or so until they get back to Eniwetok. He’s going to have to consistently lie to the Navy. What could possibly go wrong?

Why’s he doing this? Because Michael looks sad and has a pretty face? Allen groans and rests his head in his hands.

“Everything okay?” Michael asks, reappearing. He’s a few feet away, nothing more than a black blob in the darkness.

“Everything’s fine,” Allen says, taking the flashlight when Michael hands it to him. “Just a little, you know,” he raises his hands and gestures vaguely around. “I’m letting it all sink in.” He turns the flashlight on, blinking a few times as the cavern floods from with light.

“Ow!” Michael steps away from it, raising a hand to shield his eyes. “I didn’t expect it to be so bright.”

“Sorry,” Allen says, pointing it to the ground. “Do you think this is a permanent thing? That your eyes are too sensitive to see in brighter lighting?”

“No, I think..” Michael lowers his hand, slightly, squinting. “I think it’s getting better. It’s adjusting. Ugh. Good to know."

"Can you control it? Like, can you keep your eyes attuned to the light?" Allen asks.

"Doesn't feel like it," Michael says. He lowers his hand a little more and blinks aggressively. "Feels involuntary." He looks to the back of the cave briefly. “Guess we both need the flashlight now. Do you want to see Pero’s stuff?”

“Lead the way,” Allen replies.

It takes a little longer than Allen would life to get to where they’re going. The air starts to thin out quite a bit, and Allen’s pretty sure that he’s breathing hard enough that it’s become noticeable.

Sure enough, Michael turns to him and asks, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Allen says. “There’s not a lot of oxygen this deep in the cave.”

“Oh. Shit. I didn’t realize,” Michael says. “We can head back.”

“Is it much further?” Allen asks.

“We’re almost there,” Michael says. “Just around that bend up there.”

“I’ll be alright, then,” Allen replies. “As long as we don’t stay too long.”

Everything is just about as Michael described. There’s a chest tucked away against the cave wall. Inside it, there’s a few trinkets and a small stack of papers.

“This trebuchet design is fascinating,” Allen says, lifting it off the stack. “It’s heavily modified from the traditional trebuchet, but these haven’t been used in centuries. It’s a wonder that this even existed.”

“Maybe Pero was a historian,” Michael suggests.

“Maybe,” Allen says, setting the paper back down in the chest. Michael’s got his own bag of things. When Allen asks about it, Michael hands it to him with little preamble. It’s mostly utility. For all that Allen looks, he can’t really find anything personal in there. For better or for worse, Michael had done a good job of stripping himself of his military identity.

* * *

They head out a while after the sun dips below the horizon when it’s almost completely dark out.

“This way,” Michael says, using a fallen tree trunk as a stepping stone to get up the side of a hill. It’s definitely a bit of a jump and more than Allen could feasibly make on his own.

Allen points the flashlight at the hill, trying to see if there’s any other way up.

“Here,” Michael says, stepping back down to the trunk and reaching out his arm. Allen grabs it with his free hand, and Michael pulls him up. “This is the fastest way,” he says. “There’s an easier path, but it takes a lot longer.”

Michael doesn’t let go of Allen’s hand, a fact that Allen finds a little strange at first, but then it starts to make a little more sense when he sees how rough the terrain is. Allen’s breathing hard with exertion by the time they make it.

“I’ll show you the easier way on the way back,” Michael says. “It leads to the beach pretty well, so we can go straight to the boat.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Allen says, and Michael sticks out an arm to steady him. Allen points the flashlight up to the trees. The flashlight’s not quite strong enough to illuminate them completely, but, from what he can see, it just about fits the requirements.

“I’ll have to come back here during the day, but I honestly it looks perfect,” Allen says. He casts the beam around the clearing. It’s flat and fairly level. There are a few indents in the ground which Michael explains are from the catapult and from the boulders Pero had used as ammunition.

“We might need to fill in a few of these,” Allen says. “At least they’re not that deep.” He pushes the displaced dirt with his foot.

“I could do that now,” Michael volunteers. “I didn’t really think of it at the time.”

Allen shakes his head. “It’s alright. We really should get back to the boat.”

“This way then.”

Michael leads him down a gently sloping path. It’s far from marked, and there are times when the grasses grow up to his knees, but it’s a much more feasible walk.

“There,” Michael says when they clear the treeline and beach cliffs come into view. “You’ve seen it before from a different perspective, but that slope there leads down to the beach.”

“I’ll lead the way?” Allen asks and Michael falls behind him in silent affirmation.

The Lieutenant's voice comes bursting out from across the shore the second the flashlight beam falls on the PT boat. “That better fucking be you, Hynek. Where in the goddamn hell have you been?”

“Sorry, Lieu,” Allen yells back the second he’s in range. His voice will never carry as far as Lt. Turner’s. “I found someone.”

“And you waited until now to tell me?” Lt. Turner asks. “What in the fresh hell were you thinking?” He ducks down out of sight for a brief second and then pops up again, this time with his own flashlight. The ultra bright beam hits Allen square in the face before it moves off of him and lands on Michael who physically recoils away from it.

Allen steps over to situate himself so that he’s blocking most of the light. “Michael here has a condition that makes him very dangerously sensitive to the sunlight. I didn’t want to leave him alone, so I stayed with him until night.”

“Shit,” Turner says, flicking off his flashlight. “Get up here.”

Allen waves for Michael to go up before him.

“Sorry for the rude introduction. Hynek here was supposed to check in with us well over seven hours ago,” Turner says once they reach the deck, giving Allen the stink-eye. “I’m Lieutenant Junior Grade Cameron Turner. Call me Cam, even if Hynek won’t.”

“Michael Jones,” Michael says, and Turner grabs his hand and gives it a firm, abbreviated shake.

“Michael,” Turner says. “How long have been out here for?”

“About two weeks,” Michael replies.

“Damn lucky we got here when we did.” Turner whistles. “Here, come down, we’ll get you something to eat and drink. You’re probably starving.”

Turner takes Michael down to the kitchen, and Allen trails behind.

“Hey,” Robles says, popping his head out of the kitchen area. “Where’s the— What the fuck? You’re new.”

“Allen found him,” Turner says, gesturing for him to get out of the way. Robles steps back and leans against the oven.

"Hello," says Michael.

“We’ve never picked up a castaway before,” Robles says, twisting around to get a cup. He looks at Michael appraisingly. “Deserter or civilian?”

“Civilian,” Allen says, butting in. The hint of danger in the air at the previously unasked question dispels. “So be nice to him.”

“When am I not?” Robles asks, and Turner snorts, taking the cup from him and putting it under the tap.

“We’ve got hot chocolate, but it’s the powdered stuff you put in water,” Turner says. “Take a seat.”

"Plain water’s fine,” Michael says, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

“No food either,” Allen says. “I’m moderating his diet to make sure he doesn’t eat too much so his stomach can get used to food again.”

“Here you go, then,” Turner says, setting the cup in front of him. "Michael, this is Richard Robles, resident radioman and cook. Rich, this is Michael Jones."

Michael, who's in the middle of taking a sip of water when Turner makes the introduction, sets his cup down quickly and says, "Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too," Robles replies, "now, if you don't mind, four's a crowd, so I'll take my leave. You missed meal time again, Doc. You're on your own." He closes the door none to gently behind him.

Allen waves him off. He's missed plenty of meals before. He's more focused on the Lieutenant's check-up slash interrogation. There isn't exactly strict protocol here, and the circumstances under which Michael had appeared were very strange, to say the least.

“I gotta tell you, we weren’t expecting to pick anyone up,” Turner says once silence had settled back down over the room. “How’d you get out here in the first place? Don’t see many Americans ‘round these parts.”

“Fell off a fishing boat,” Michael says sheepishly. “We got caught up in a storm.”

"Fishing boat, huh?" Turner sits down at the side of the table opposing Michael and props his arms up, knitting his fingers together.

"Yes," Michael says and then hesitantly adds a "sir?" to the end of it like a civilian might. Allen’s grateful that he's a good actor, though he supposes does have his life riding on his success.

"None of that," Turner replies. "Like I said, just Cam is fine. What were you doing in that fishing boat anyway? You don’t really look like the fishing type, and you’ve got that condition and all."

“Oh!” says Michael. “I was doing a psychological survey.”

“A psychological survey?” Turner asks. “You look a little young to be a shrink.”

“He’ll be attending Ohio State in the fall,” Allen cuts in.

Michael nods. “Just trying to get a little experience before I start.”

“What a coincidence,” says Turner. “Hynek, here, is a professor at that fine establishment. Never went to University myself. Military right out of high school.” He pauses consideringly. “So Hynek says you’re hypersensitive to light. Never heard of a condition that does anything like that. Tell me more.”

“I may be better equipped to answer this,” Allen says.

“Better equipped than a man who’s been living with the condition?” Turner asks, and Allen swallows and hopes that Michael has a good memory. They’d prepared for this eventuality, but he’d still rather not risk it. “Let the man speak.”

“It’s called Hydroa vacciniforme,” Michael says. His pronunciation is a little stilted, and Allen hopes this particular point is lost in the novelty of the strange name. If Turner is suspicious, he doesn’t let it show. “Sunlight gives me blisters on my skin, and I can get headaches and fevers from exposure.”

“That sounds awfully inconvenient,” Turner says, at least looking sympathetic.

Michael shrugs. “I’ve had it most of my life. There’s always ways to work around it.” He stops then adds, “Well, not always.”

“How’ve you been staying out of the sun?” Turner asks.

“There’s a cave in the island,” Michael says. “I stayed in there during the day. Came out at night for food, if I could find it.”

“And on the fishing boat?”

“I stayed below deck,” Michael says with a shrug. “I was only really there to talk to the crew. I got my fresh air during the night.”

Turner whistles. “You’ve got it rough, kid. I’m afraid we won’t be able to get you back home for a bit. I can’t really give you the details of our mission, you understand”—he gives Allen a particularly pointed look, and yeah Allen understands this is all _supposed_ to be classified, yet—”but we have to make a few more stops like this one. We’ll be landing in Hawai’i in just over a week.”

“I’m just grateful you picked me up,” Michael says.

“We can’t very well leave you on the island,” Turner says. “I don’t imagine you’ll be much of a bother to the crew anyway. Hynek’s probably already planning on taking care of you.”

Michael turns to look at Allen with a smile, and Allen offers him one back.

“I’ll keep him out of your way, Lieutenant,” Allen says in his most courteous voice. “It’ll be like he isn’t even here. I intend to put the extra living space to good use.”

“If that’s what you want,” Turner says and then turns to Michael. “We do have extra bunks with the boys if he ever gets too overbearing. No windows down here, so there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Michael says, a bit of a laugh on his voice. “I do appreciate the offer.”

“Hynek, show him around, won’t you?” Turner continues. “Come back when you’re done.”

Allen stands and gestures for Michael to follow. He takes Michael’s cup and places it in the sink before leading Michael through the narrow corridors to his room. It’s not far away, but, then again, nothing in this boat is really far away from any other part of itself.

“It’s a bit cramped,” Allen says absently as he moves his tools, books, and papers out of the way.

“Maybe,” Michael says looking around. “It’s pretty nice, all things considered. I can’t exactly stay out of your way here, though.”

“Don’t bother,” Allen says. “I’ve taken responsibility for you, so it’s basically your job to be in my way.”

Michael ducks his head. “Still.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Allen says. He empties out his pockets into his suitcase, flips through his notepad, and sticks it back into his pocket. “I imagine you’re familiar with boats like this.”

“Somewhat,” Michael says. “They’re not all the same.”

“You don’t mind a bit of an abbreviated tour then?” Allen asks. “The Lieutenant’s going to expect me back in a bit, and I’m afraid I haven’t spent a lot of time exploring.”

“Maybe,” Michael says. “I’ve only been in one before, and I’m pretty sure it was a little different than this. I don’t suppose it matters too much if I’m spending most of my time in here.”

“Ah, that’s a good point.” Allen opens the door and leads him back into the hallway. They go back in the direction of the kitchen but go past it to the crew’s quarters that are located in the bow.

“I’m sure you can guess what this is,” Allen says, peeking his head in first to make sure that everyone’s decent.

Robles waves from his bunk. “Grand tour?” he asks. “Make sure to tell Mikey where McCarthy keeps his porn.”

“Shut the fuck up, Rich,” Benjamin McCarthy says from the opposite side of the room.

Okay, maybe not so decent, but that’s a little more of a permanent state.

“You’ve already met Robles,” Allen sighs. “He’s the radioman alongside being cook.”

“Mikey?” Michael asks.

“Ignore him,” Allen says. “Benjamin McCarthy’s up there. He’s the gunner’s mate.”

“Hey,” McCarthy says. “Like the doctor says, just ignore Rich. We all do.”

“Except when I’m feeding you all,” Robles says. “You all pay attention then.”

“Moving on.” Rowe jumps down from the bunk aboves Robles. “Mason Rowe,” he says, extending his hand to Michael. “Motor machinist’s mate, second class. Glad we found you. Michael right?”

Michael nods and shakes his hand.

“Nice to meet you, then,” Rowe continues. “If either of these two jokers gives you grief, let me know, and I’ll bet them up for you, yeah?”

“Yeah?” Michael says, but it’s more of a question than an acknowledgment.

“It’s a joke,” Rowe says. “Mostly.” Then, to Allen, he adds, “If you’re looking for everyone else, Johnny’s asleep right now. Grant and Holland are where they usually are. Tell them to go to bed if you see them.”

“They’re...interesting,” Michael says as they leave the crew quarters and head back in the direction of the stern.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know people just like them,” Allen says. He tries to be purposefully vague about where Michael might have known them from. He doesn’t want to say anything too obvious in case anyone overhears.

Michael seems to catch his point easily enough. “Nah, I knew some people with even more personality that Rich,” he says. “Fun guys. Wicked sense of humor. Good for morale sometimes, I guess.”

Allen leads him up the ladder to the chart house. He hears a mumbled “Who is it?” when he reaches the top.

“Hynek?” Holland asks. He’s bent over the table squinting heavily at the chart, but he turns to look behind him. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m guessing the news hasn’t gotten to you yet, but we’ve picked up someone on the island,” Allen says, just as Michael finishes his nearly perfectly timed ascent.

“Oh,” Holland says. “Shit.”

“This is Michael Jones,” Allen says. “He’s a castaway, washed up on this island two weeks ago.”

Holland lets out a low whistle. “Damn, okay, that’s some good timing. You doing okay, man?”

“I’m alright,” Michael says. “Thanks for taking me aboard.”

“This is Vince Holland,” Allen says. “The quartermaster. He likes to spend most of his time up here.”

“I’m guessing Mason’s telling me to get my ass to bed,” Holland says. “No can do. We just got news that we’re supposed to avoid this section of ocean,”—he taps the map—“so I’ve still got to plot a course around it if we want to take off tomorrow afternoon. Love to get to know you better, Jones, but I gotta get back to work.”

“Lieutenant has all the information,” Allen says. “You should probably check in with him before you go to sleep.”

Holland waves him away. “Thanks.”

They go to the engine room next, a little closer to the stern. Allen opens the door and gestures for Michael to go in ahead of him. It’s there that Allen finds Lawson Grant, motor machinist's mate, slumped over on a box next to one of the engines.

“I know,” Grant mumbles, but he doesn’t move or open his eyes. “I’ve got a bed, and I should sleep on it.”

“That’s what Rowe advised,” Allen says, going over to stand a little closer to him.

That gets Grant’s head up. “Allen? Not who I was expecting.” His eyes fall on Michael, then, and he swears. “Okay, I must be really tired now, because I think I’m hallucinating.”

“Don’t worry,” Allen says. “Michael’s real.”

“Don’t remember any guys named Michael though,” Grant says, staring. “You’re not the gunner’s mate, right?”

“That’s McCarthy,” Allen says.

“Cook, then?” Grant asks.

“Robles,” Allen says. “Michael’s not part of the crew. Cut the act. Michael was stranded on the island. We’re taking him back with us.”

“Huh,” Grant says. “Cool.” He stands and stretches. “Well, the engine’s in good order. Haven’t checked the weapons in a while.”

“The guns can wait,” Allen says. “Go to bed.”

“Going,” Grant says. He pauses at the door and adds a good-natured, “Hypocrite.”

“Is that guy okay?” Michael asks when the door swings shut again, and they’re left alone.

“Lawson Grant. He’s fine,” Allen says. “Maybe a little sleep deprived, but he likes to pretend he’s out of it because he thinks it’s funny. He’s an excellent mechanic though. He acts like the engines are his own children.”

“Huh,” Michael says.

“Let’s get you to bed, too,” Allen continues. “Is there anything else you want to see?”

“Bathroom?” Michael asks.

“Just follow the other door in my room,” Allen says. “Knock first. I share it with Ensign Reid. Johnny is what Rowe called him. He’s the only one you haven’t met.”

“Thanks,” Michael says. “Seriously. Thank you so much. For everything.”

“Just doing the right thing,” Allen says even though he knows it’s a little more than that. He just doesn’t want Michael to feel beholden to him.

Allen leads Michael back to his room and gets him set up for the night.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” Allen says, stopping himself from literally trying to tuck Michael into bed. He knows the man can fend for himself well enough. He just feels...like if there’s something he can do, then he should do it. Maybe it’s based a little too much in pity. “I’ve still got to do my normal check in with the Lieutenant.”

Michael looks worried briefly, but the look flickers off his face just as fast. “I’ll see you in a bit?” he asks with a smile.”

“It shouldn’t take too long,” Allen replies.

Turner’s still in the kitchen when Allen sets out to find him. He’s gotten up from his seat at the table and has taken to reviewing their ample rations.

“Did Michael get settled in alright?” he asks, but he doesn’t sound like he’s particularly concerned with the answer.

“He did,” Allen says. He stands at the edge of the table and leans onto it slightly. Normally, he’d have his book out by now and would be discussing his findings.

“I need an honest answer from you,” Turner says. He looks away from the rations, looking Allen straight in the eyes. “Do you trust that man?”

Allen tries not to show any of his fear outwardly. “I do,” he says.

“And you’ll come to me if he ever turns out to be anything other than he claims?” Turner prompts.

“I will,” Allen says. Did he reply too fast? Shit, it felt like he said it a little too quick.

“You seem to like him well enough, but I need your loyalty,” Turner says, “so long as you’re on my ship. You understand?”

“I do,” Allen replies.

“Excellent, then,” Turner says. His demeanor turns warmer. “I trust you understand why I had to ask?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” he says. “Now show me what you found.”

Allen takes a metaphorical breath. “There’s one spot that looks promising. It’s definitely got an edge on the second island, but I’ll have to do the calculations to see if it’s better than the first.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Turner says. “Go on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also check out [Jedikatie's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jedikatie/pseuds/Jedikatie) awesome [artwork](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507036) for a scene from this chapter!!
> 
> Here's the people, since I know that can be confusing to keep track.
> 
> commanded by Lt. Junior Grade (LTJG) Cameron “Cam” Turner  
> 2IC-> Ensign (ENS) Johnathan “Johnny” Reid  
> enlisted:  
> gunner’s mate 2nd class Benjamin McCarthy,  
> radioman 2nd class Richard “Rich” Robles (cook),  
> motor machinist’s mate 1st class Lawson Grant (engineer),  
> motor machinist’s mate 2nd class Mason Rowe  
> quartermaster 1st class Vince Holland (steer, navigate, surrounding awareness)
> 
> fun fact: this entire chapter takes place in less that 24 hours.


	3. -- (Michael)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael acclimates to life on the PT Boat. A little. Or maybe he doesn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all I'm super sorry this chapter took a solid 9 months. I, for one, can't believe it's been that long, but digital records don't lie (most of the time).
> 
> Huge, huge, huge thanks to [JDSampson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JDSampson/pseuds/JDSampson) for betaing this chapter. If I had to proofread this chapter myself, I would have had 9 months worth of flashbacks (because I genuinely worked on this piece by piece over 9 months...which is............never again), and I never would have gotten it out.
> 
> >> Also, the full title and the chapter titles have been bothering me. Does anyone mind if I change it? I just need something shorter and more topical. Please let me know if you're okay with it!
> 
> And check end notes for warnings. They'll probably be a bit spoilery though.

Michael doesn’t realize how tired he is until Hynek’s left and he’s alone in his room. He’s not entirely sure when he’s meant to sleep while he’s on the boat, but Hynek gave him the strong impression that he was supposed to be sleeping now, so he takes off his shoes and his pants and gets under the covers. He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.

* * *

He wakes up briefly when Hynek joins him a while later, but the doctor makes a soothing sound, and he slips right back into unconsciousness.

* * *

Michael isn't sure how long he sleeps, but he does know it is absolutely the most restful sleep he's had since he landed on the island. The shitty military-grade bed and the warmth of Hynek's back radiating heat from a hair's breadth away might as well be heaven on Earth for how good—well, not bad would be more accurate—he feels.

Hynek does wake him up at some point, his warm hand gently shaking Michael's shoulder. It's easy enough to draw him to consciousness. You learn to sleep light in the military. When he opens his eyes, Hynek looks apologetic.

"Hey," Hynek says. "Sorry to wake you. I have to go back out and show the Lieutenant the clearing. I didn't want to disturb you, but I didn't want to leave you here to wake up alone."

"Oh," Michael mumbles. "Thanks."

Hynek smiles and pats his arm. "I'll be back soon," he says. "It shouldn't take longer than a few hours." He slips out of the room, leaving Michael alone with nothing to stare at but the ceiling.

There's a gooey feeling in his brain, the kind of exhaustion he gets when he's woken up early or slept too little too many days in a row.

He closes his eyes for a little bit and tries to fall back asleep but finds himself just staring at the insides of his eyelids. If sleep won’t come to him, he’s not going to force it.

Groaning, he pushes himself off the bed and looks around the room. The ground feels unsteady beneath his feet, and he can’t quite tell if it’s because he’s disoriented or if the ground itself is actually moving.

_Boat. He’s on a boat._

It’s a docked boat, parked neatly on the soft sands of the island. It’s got to be susceptible to a little back and forth motion.

Michael sticks his arm out and grabs ahold of a rail mounted on the wall and takes stock of what’s in the room with him. There’s a small desk with a few books, notebooks, and stray papers on top of it. A small cup of pens and pencils and an open box with measuring instruments. There’s a closed briefcase under the table, pushed behind the legs of the chair, but Michael’s not keen to go rooting around without invitation. On the other side of the room, there’s an open suitcase filled with clothes. Most of them are folded up neatly, but a few have been thrown on top like they were left there in a hurry.

This aside, the room is fairly blank save for one picture above the desk of a young boy, likely about elementary school age. Maybe he’s Hynek’s nephew or maybe even his son. Michael wouldn’t be surprised if he’s married. Hynek’s got to be in his thirties by now.

There aren’t any clocks in the room. Michael has no idea how long it’s been since Hynek left or how much longer he’ll have to wait until he gets back. He’s never been one for just sitting around, but he’s not too keen on mingling with the crew if he can avoid it. That means his options are sitting around and...sitting around.

He does that for a while, even tries going back to sleep, but he doesn’t get much of anywhere with that. Just when he’s on the brink of losing his sanity to boredom, he hears a knock on the door.

Cautiously, he stands up and walks over to the door. It could be Hynek, of course, but it could always be someone else. There’s no peephole on the door, so he can’t find out. Swearing under his breath, he briefly considers all possible actions and figures the least suspicious thing to do would be to open the door and let whoever’s outside in.

The knock comes again, more insistent this time, and as soon as it’s done, Michael opens the door a little bit.

There’s a man standing out in the hall, one that Michael’s never seen before. He must be Ensign Reid.

“If you’re looking for Dr. Hynek, I think he’s out on the island,” Michael says, hoping he’ll go away.

It doesn’t work, not that Michael expected it to.

“I know,” Reid says. “He’s not due back for another two hours yet. I heard we had someone new aboard, and I figured I’d check you out for myself.”

He’s got such a disarming smile on his face that Michael almost invites him in without a second thought. It’s not his room though, and Dr. Hynek _had_ told him to be careful

“Oh,” Michael says. “Okay. Did you want to step outside, maybe? It’s Dr. Hynek’s room so...”

Reid laughs, soft and kind. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. The boat’s small. Nothing we haven’t all seen before.”

Michael can’t see any faults in his reasoning so he steps back and Reid steps inside. “I’m Ensign Johnathan Reid, by the way. Most people call me Johnny. And your name is?”

Michael edges around Johnny to close the door and then takes a seat on Hynek’s bed. He hopes it’s not presumptuous or telling, but he’s heard stories of men out at sea, lacking a woman’s touch for months on end. He’s at least confident that Johnny won’t take the action to mean anything.

“Michael, uh, Michael Jones,” he says, stumbling briefly over the last name, but he’s been trained as well as any army man. He won’t forget.

“It’s nice to meet you, Michael Jones,” Johnny says, sticking his hand out for a handshake. It’s a strange gesture, friendly, paired with his bright smile, but formal at the same time. Michael takes it.

Johnny's hand is warm, and Michael is suddenly very pointedly aware that his own hand is very much not.

Still, cold hands don't necessarily mean vampire, and the last thing he wants to do is draw attention to himself.

"I've heard quite a bit about you from the others," Johnny says. He pulls the chair out from Hynek's desk and takes a seat. Taking his cue, Michael sits down on the bed, folding his hands neatly over his lap.

"All good, I hope?" Michael asks, trying for a little humor.

Johnny shrugs, his ever-present cordial smile still softening his face. "You know scuttlebutt."

Michael does, in fact, know how scuttlebutt is, but he's not entirely sure _when_ exactly he learned about it. Was it before he joined the AAF? Or after? He takes a gamble and blinks in response.

"I guess you wouldn't," Johnny says. "It's like, rumors, gossip. The stuff you listen to because it's day-in, day-out of nothing but water, water, and water, and you're desperate for entertainment, but you also know not to treat a word of it as fact.

"I'm sure they couldn't have gotten my story _that_ wrong," Michael says.

"So you're actually a hypnotist, then?" Johnny asks.

Michael bursts out laughing. "No, I, ah, I was going to go to university for psychology, but I hadn't even started yet."

"Dangers of believing scuttlebutt," Johnny says, open and reassuring. "Let's see what other little details went horribly awry, why don't we?"

Johnny’s a good conversationalist, and Michael doesn’t realize that they’ve been carefully poring over the details of his made-up life story until they’ve been going at it for a while. Maybe Michael should keep his personal information a little closer to his chest, but Johnny’s got a warm, open smile and a great sense of humor, and he’s quite possibly the friendliest and most unassuming military man on this ship. When Johnny leaves a good half an hour later, the first thing Michael finds himself wondering is if he’ll get another chance to talk to him again.

And that’s when Michael realizes that he might have just spent the past two hours in an interrogation. _Shit._ So much for being into psychology.

Thankfully, Hynek doesn’t give him too much time to stew in his own potential self-disappointment.

Hynek bustles into the room a little while later, stripping off his coat and hanging it on the hook on the door. He’s bright-faced and cheery, and Michael has to try very hard not to think about how good of a look it is on him. Shit. He’s usually better at suppressing that stuff. He’s definitely going to blame it on the vampire thing.

“Now that I got a chance to see the place in the daylight, this is definitely the most promising spot we’ve found so far,” Hynek says. “It shouldn’t take much work to get the clearing pretty much perfect for the job.”

“Oh,” Michael says. “Good.”

“We might not have found it without you, so thank you for showing it to me,” Hynek says. He looks Michael straight in the face for the first time since he’s entered the room, and his grin falters. “Did something happen?” he asks.

“Ensign Reid dropped by,” Michael says. He has no idea how telling this is, given how little he really knows about Johnny, or how Hynek will react. It feels like a guilty admission, though, instead of just pure fact, and for all Michael knows, he could have just ruined everything. He holds his breath and waits for Hynek to reply.

Hynek, thankfully, looks anything but angry, and Michael finds safety in the fact that Hynek wears all of his emotions on his sleeve. If he really was upset, there’s a pretty good chance that Michael would know.

“Tell me what happened,” Hynek says, sitting down on his bed and gesturing for Michael to sit down next to him.

“He dropped by, I told him you weren’t here, and then he was just so friendly, that we started talking, and I ended up going over the entire story with him because he’d said he’d heard some wild rumors.” Michael takes a deep breath to steady himself. “I think it was an interrogation.”

“No doubt it was,” Hynek says, pressing his shoulder comfortably against Michael’s own. “Reid is a tricky guy, you can’t trust him.” Hynek shakes his head. “I should have warned you better last night.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael says quickly.

 

“No, no, don’t worry about it,” Hynek reassures him. “If he’d found anything out, he would have gone to Turner about it, and then Turner would have talked to me. Everything is fine.”

“Still,” Michael says. “I’m supposed to be studying psychology. Shouldn’t I have noticed sooner?”

“Considering that you’re technically supposed to be going into your freshman year in college, I hardly think that’s an assumption anyone can make,” Hynek says. “It’s fine. If you see Reid again, though, it’s really very important that you keep acting friendly towards him. If he doesn’t think that you know about him, he’ll keep acting how he did when he made his first impression, and that should keep you safe.”

“Okay,” Michael says. “Okay. Thank you.”

Hynek smiles, not as brilliant as before, but it’s softer this time, more personal, and Michael thinks that if his heart was still pumping blood, it might have skipped a beat just there. Because of the strange vampire reaction, of course, but being a vampire kind of took care of the whole heart issue altogether.

* * *

After that, Hynek goes over all the members of the crew again, this time in greater detail. He doesn’t provide more information on how to act around the rest of them like he did for Johnny. Hynek does tell him outright that Johnny is manipulable _specifically_ because he is manipulative, but the rest of the crew largely just consists of normal people who tend to talk to people without being five feet deep in ulterior motives and suspicion.

“Ensign Reid doesn’t like me because he could never get me to work to his benefit,” Hynek says, circling the stick figure of Reid that he’s drawn on a page of his notebook to help illustrate this particular lesson. “I’ve always been too focused on my work to put too much weight into anything he’s said to me, and once he realized that, he became hostile toward me. He doesn’t show that side of himself if anyone else is around, so you should be safe.”

Michael feels a little better after that, but, when he was in the Army Air Force, he was set to be trained in interrogation himself. Sure, he could say whatever and act, however, was needed to get information out of an enemy but doing the same things to the people that he worked with and was supposed to trust? It just doesn’t sit right with him. 

“I’m serious,” Hynek says, taking whatever expression Michael’s making to mean that he’s still stuck on the fact that he let Johnny into the room. “Whatever happened, don’t worry about it, don’t think about it too much. Pretend like you never realized he was interrogating you. Pretend we haven’t had this conversation. Pretend you’re still friends with him. We can go over your story again, just to make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything.”

“No, no, I remember everything pretty well,” Michael says. “They prepared me for that in the AAF. There’s just some things that I did make up that I should probably tell you, just in case Reid starts questioning you?”

Hynek flips to a new page of his notebook and says, “Go ahead.”

He writes down what Michael tells him in some kind of coded text. On the face of it, it looks just like shorthand, but it doesn’t match what Michael’s saying. It’s smart, Michael thinks, in the event that Hynek’s book somehow ended up in the hands of one of the other crew members, and even that is unlikely, given how Hynek always tends to keep it on his person.

There’s not a lot for Michael to tell, just about enough to fill up half of one of the small pages. Hynek stares at the page for a while and then nods.

“Now that we’ve got all that sorted out, how are you feeling?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” Michael says. “I mean, I don’t really know what fine is supposed to feel like after I got turned into a vampire, but I don’t really feel a lot different than when I was on the island.”

“Better? Worse?”

Michael shrugs.

“I guess you haven’t been here for long, so that would make sense,” Hynek ponders, mostly to himself, Michael thinks, since Hynek’s turned a little and is staring distantly at the wall. He’s quiet for a while before turning back to Michael with a new question. “Foodwise, are you hungry yet?”

“I’m good,” Michael says. It hasn’t been that long since he last had some bugs, and, according to his observations, he won’t even really be that hungry until at least 24 hours have passed. He doesn’t know how long it will be until he’s desperately hungry, but he’ll wait out the whole damn week if he can help it. He knows that Hynek offered his blood, but the idea is still wholly uncomfortable.

Michael looks at Hynek and takes in the way that the doctor is looking at him in interest, his attention fully trained on him.

Okay, maybe not _wholly_ uncomf—

Michael abruptly tamps down whatever vampire instinct it was that caused that thought to bubble up to the surface. Absolutely not.

“Alright,” Hynek says. “Just let me know whenever you need to eat.”

“Sure,” Michael says, even though he absolutely knows that he will not.

* * *

The boat takes off for the next island shortly after Hynek gets back. He tells Michael that they’ve got a day before they hit the next island that they’re supposed to take a look at, which gives him some time to stay inside his room and work on his studies and observations.

The engines come to life, and, a short while later, the boat lurches off of the shore and into the open sea.

It’s a bit rough at first. The engines, which would normally be quite loud by human standards, fall on Michael’s ears like hammers on an anvil. When they first start, he nearly collapses on the ground, his hands flying up to his ears, but it doesn’t do much to muffle the noise.

Hynek rushes over to help, and the vampire instincts kick in. Scrambling for Hynek’s hand, he focuses on the sounds he’s making and forces the noise from the engines into the background. It feels a little strange that his advanced hearing can be so selective, but he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth if he can help it.

“Are you alright?” Hynek asks. He’s kneeling on the ground, rubbing comforting circles onto Michael’s back. “What happened?”

“I’m good,” Michael says, though it comes out a little strangled. “I’m alright. I wasn’t expecting the engines to be so loud with my hearing.”

“But you’re doing better now?” Hynek asks.

“Yeah,” Michael replies. “If I focus on something, I can make the background noises go down.”

Hynek makes a sound of interest. “Fascinating. Do you think this is going to happen every time that we have to start up the engines?”

“Oh god,” Michael groans. “I hope not. Maybe now that I’ve done it once, it’ll be automatic, or at least easier to refocus.”

“Knowing it’s coming might help,” Hynek says. “I’ll try and let you know next time it happens so you can be prepared.”

“Thank you,” Michael says. He lets go of Hynek’s hand, and the sound levels remain the same. That’s good. It would be pretty embarrassing if he had to be in contact with him for the entire ride.

Hynek gives him a reassuring smile and heads back to his desk.

Michael wants to shrink back down to bat form, just to feel smaller and safer, but it would be far too awkward to strip in front of Hynek, and being seen as a bat by the other crewmembers poses a continual risk. He chooses instead to curl up on the bed with one of Hynek’s books. It’s not like there’s space or supplies to do much else.

Despite how cramped the room is with both of them in it, Michael definitely far prefers the company. There’s an inherent safety that comes with Hynek’s presence. He might not exactly have the highest authority on the ship, but, with him around, Michael doesn’t feel so much like an intruder or a potential threat.

Michael’s probably only known him for nearly 24 hours now, but something in him, either his brain or the vampire instinct has categorized Hynek as safe, and he’s had a far too harrowing two weeks to want to question it too much.

* * *

Michael wakes up the next morning with a gnawing pit in his stomach. He lets a groan of pain escape him before remembering where he is.

“Are you feeling alright?” Hynek asks, voice coming from somewhere that is not the bed. “Anything I can do to help?”

Michael pushes himself into a sitting position and looks around the room. He finds Hynek, somehow both a morning and a night person, already sitting at his desk with a book open and a pad of graph paper under his right hand.

“I’m fine,” Michael lies. “I think it’s just dehydration.”

“Oh, how could I forget? Let me go get you a cup,” Hynek says. “I’ll be right back.” He’s already out of the room before Michael can tell him that he doesn’t have to go or even just to thank him.

Blearily, Michael rubs his eyes and presses a hand to his stomach, trying to see if he can get a little bit of the pain to go away. No such luck.

Hynek’s back in no time, pressing a cup of water into Michael’s hands.

“Drink up,” he says, “and let me know if you need more. We’ll be hitting another island later today, and I won’t be back for a couple of hours.”

“I think this will be fine,” Michael says. “Thank you.” He raises the cup to his mouth and takes a sip. The water is cold and refreshing on his tongue, but Michael’s not even sure if he needs it. It helps a little to make the pain go away, and he definitely drank water as a bat, just out of the instinct of it all, but even if he did need it as a bat, did he even need it in human form? Finding out means drinking human blood, though, and he’s not exactly keen on that.

“Either way, just let me know,” Hynek says, sitting back down at his desk, all his attention focused back on what he was doing before in an instant. Huh.

The intensity of the hunger isn’t a promising sign. If not even two full days of no bugs means that he gets this hungry this fast, then that’s a problem, even if the water hides the problem for a while. He remembers the state he was in just before he transformed into a bat for the first time and winces. Morals aside, he _really_ doesn’t want to end up there again.

On top of that, there’s no telling what he’d even do if he got that hungry. Last time, he was running completely on instinct, and there’s no telling what that would even mean with people in range. The only thing he really does know is that a small boat on the open ocean filled with Navy men is really, truly, the late place he wants to find out.

The train of thought isn’t a fun one to pursue, and it does stir up a bit of dread in his stomach that’s reminiscent of the hunger he’d just gotten to go away. Michael takes a breath and finishes the rest of his water. Okay. Think happy thoughts. Construct a new happy place. He can do this.

* * *

For all that Michael could moderate the noise of the engine, it’s still a lot better on his brain when the engines cut off. He basks in the sweet, sweet background silence, and lets his hearing senses spread out, marveling at how easily he can hear the stuff in the foreground. It’s nothing he hasn’t been able to do before, but it sounds so much better now that he knows what it’s like without it.

Hynek’s whistling a little tune under his breath that had somehow gotten lost under the sound of his heartbeat and the incessant din of the engine. A small smile creeps onto Michael’s lips and stays there even when he turns back to the book he was reading.

They’re probably only ashore for about ten minutes before Mason comes knocking looking for Hynek.

“Hey, Allen,” Mason says. “We’re going out to the island soon. Be topside in ten latest.”

“Got it,” Hynek says and turns back to his desk to start clearing stuff away. He pulls out his notebook from underneath the rubble and sticks it in his shirt pocket.

“Michael,” Mason says with a slight nod in his direction. “Doing alright?”

“Feeling a lot better,” Michael answers.

“Glad to hear it,” Mason replies and closes the door.

“Are you?” Hynek asks, tidying up his desk a little and putting away his instruments. He walks over to the door to grab his coat.

“Hm?”

“Doing alright?”

“Oh,” Michael says. “Yeah. Don’t worry about me.” The hunger is back, but it’s only a faint twinge. Nothing he can’t ignore.

“Anything I can get you before I go?” Hynek asks. “More water?”

“I’m good,” Michael says, tacking on a smile.

“Alright, well, judging by the bird’s-eye image of this island, I shouldn’t be gone for more than a few hours,” Hynek says. “Try not to get into any trouble.”

“I’ll do my best,” Michael replies.

“Stay safe,” Hynek says and closes the door on his way out.

Michael opens up his book in front of him again, but his mind wanders. He unconsciously tracks Hynek’s footsteps until he’s up on the deck and then listens to the small crowd of people until they’re off the boat and finally out of range.

The silence is nice, in a way, because it lets Michael spread out his sense of hearing. The boat creaks sometimes when the waves come in and out, and sometimes he can hear sea animals brushing up against the bottom of the boat.

There are only two people left on the boat beside himself. One he can’t identify is most likely relaxing on the deck. Whoever it is, they’re alternating between sitting and walking around slowly and casually. Michael would like to be out there. He’s been in Hynek’s room for at least a day now, and he’s longing for freedom or at least a little more space.

The other person is, by Michael’s best guess, Richard Robles, judging by the direct path that he took from the kitchen to the chart house which was then immediately followed by radio static and then the shifting high pitched frequencies of a radio being tuned. Unless someone had taken up an interest in messing with professional radio equipment, Rich, cook and radioman, had to be his guy.

Michael’s turned half his attention back to his book and the other half towards wondering if he might actually have a chance to turn into bat form when a message comes through the radio.

Michael closes the book, sets it down on the bed, and immediately focuses on the radio. It’s pretty far away, all things considered, and he can’t catch everything that’s being said, some parts muted, some parts actually quieter than Robles’ frantic scribbling, but he hears enough to get the gist of it.

Operation...Brass Giant...success. Michael pumps his fist into the air. That was the mission off Efate he was supposed to be on. It feels a bit like cheering for the home team, now that he’s supposed to be Michael Jones, civilian and not Lt. Michael Quinn. It’s less personal, but still just as exciting.

They list the dead and the missing next. It’s a long list, but shorter than some that Michael’s heard before. He doesn’t know most of the names, a few are people he met in passing. Buzz’s stands out. Shit.

Buzz was a friend, someone that Michael had fought side-by-side with, someone that he might have been able to protect if _all this_ hadn’t happened.

The radio transmission doesn’t give him much time to let the sorrow develop because the next thing that the operator says is that they have a few missing people, potentially suspected of defecting.

It’s a short list, only names, ranks, and branches, no extra information given.

“Private Chris Sims, Marines, Private Harry Richard, AAF, and Lieutenant Michael Quinn, AAF.”

Michael doesn’t pay attention to the rest of the transmission, turning all of his listening capabilities instead to Rich’s vitals. No change in heart rate, breathing, he just keeps on scribbling along like he doesn’t immediately suspect that something might be up with that strange guy they picked up off an island.

Michael tries to calm himself down. This is all procedure. Nothing is out of the ordinary. This can hardly be Rich’s first time writing down a list of defectors, the only thing is that this time they have a man on board with the same first name.

Michael hopes that the fake story that he and Hynek made up will hold up strong enough that they don’t even begin to doubt he’s anything other than he says he is. After all, he can hardly carry out the duties of a Lieutenant in the AAF as a vampire, even if he wanted to.

Deep breath. Deep breath. Everything is going to be fine. It has to.

Shit. Why does the scary stuff always have to happen when Allen’s away? He wants to turn into a bat and curl up and be warm in some dark corner, but an untimely “disappearance” now would be far, far, far too suspicious.

Michael tries to distract himself with the book, but he ends up frantically tracking every sound and noise that happens on or near the PT boat until he can finally hear Hynek’s heartbeat again.

* * *

News of the radio transmission reaches Hynek before Hynek can get back to his room. Michael listens as word travels first from Rich to Vince then to Cam and Johnny and finally to the rest of the crew, Hynek included.

Michael’s not too good at picking up if any of the crew members are suspicious. There are some elevated heartbeats, but that could be from anything—exertion from out on the island, excitement about the news, joy, sadness, whatever.

Hynek's heartbeat is raised too. He's the only one that Michael can pick apart from the crowd, but he's also the one that Michael has the least reason to be worried about. Hynek already knows his real name, knows that the AAF's going to be looking for him.

Hynek comes into the room a few minutes later.

"No one suspects that you're Michael Quinn," he says, shedding his coat and hanging it up on the door. "Still, I don't think it's a good idea to remind anyone of your presence for a while."

"Sounds good to me," Michael replies. His stomach chooses that exact moment to cramp and he has to grimace to prevent himself from buckling forward in pain.

Hynek's eyebrows knit together in a concerned frown.

"Are you doing alright?" he asks.

"I'm fine," Michael says, but it comes out pained and forced.

"You're clearly not," Hynek says, approaching like Michael imagines a worried parent might. "What's going on? You're not seasick are you?"

"I'm _fine_ ," Michael insists. Shit. He's experienced hunger worse than this before, even as a vampire. He should have a handle on this.

Hynek's eyes narrow. "You're hungry." He says it like a statement of fact.

Michael knows he should object, but Hynek speaks with such authority and from a position of power that Michael's military training kicks in and forces him into a state of deference and honesty. He can't lie.

That doesn't mean he can't stay quiet though, and he shifts uncomfortably to ease his nerves.

Hynek sighs and sits down on his chair, scrubbing his face with his hands. He’s silent for maybe just a moment too long, but once his hands are down again, the expression on his face is calm and maybe just a bit pitying. Shit. This isn’t an outcome Michael wanted.

“Michael,” Hynek says quietly. “When I invited you on this ship, I did so with the full knowledge that we would reach this point.” He takes his hat off and sets it on the desk. “I spent a good amount of time convincing you that I’d be willing to provide my blood if needed.”

Michael swallows. He knows all this, technically, even if he has to keep reminding himself of it. “I just...” Michael starts but he trails off, not sure how to phrase his anxieties, especially when he’s not even sure if he should say them at all.

“What’s stopping you?” Hynek presses. His face is soft and open, and Michael hasn’t had anyone talk to him quite like that in _years_.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Michael says, sounding far more frantic than he intends to, but once he starts talking he finds it hard to stop. “I’ve never drunk blood before, so what if I lose control? What if I bite you too hard or in the wrong place? What if that’s how everyone else finds out?”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Hynek says soothingly, standing up from his chair so he can sit next to Michael on the bed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m willing to take the risk and find out.” He smiles, placing his hand on Michael’s shoulder and smiling. “Both as a scientist and a friend, and for whatever it’s worth, I do trust you.”

Whatever it’s worth. Jesus. Trust probably means something different for Hynek, but, for Michael, trust is the farthest thing from easy. Fuck, he’s even fallen in _love_ with people faster than he’s trusted them. The fact that Hynek _trusts_ him, even though they’ve only known each other a few days. The fact that Hynek trusts _him_.

Then Hynek says something absolutely devastating.

“Trust _me_. It’s going to be okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Intentional self-starvation and a few mental spirals
> 
> (I had several eating issues pop up over the course of writing this, mostly related to my depression and frugality, so I was kind of, super aware of it? I know that starvation is a bit of a theme in this fic, but this time it's intentional!)
> 
> oh yeah also in my notes somewhere it says michael's 22, so i guess that's his age in this fic
> 
> outline says 3 more chapters!!


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